In 1979's The White Album, Californian Joan Didion wrote this essay about her relationship with water.
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons.
Jackie Collins's final British interview: 'I'm still here, I love what I do'
Less than two weeks before her death, the author gave no inkling of her illness but talked eagerly about her memoir, as yet unpublished
Ruth Huntman Sunday 20 September 2015
L
ess than two weeks ago, as she contemplated her looming 78th birthday,Jackie Collinswas in a firmly optimistic mood. “I couldn’t care less about my age,” she said. “I’m still here, I love what I do, and I have a passion for it … it’s better than the alternative.”
They did not seem like the words of a woman facing a terminal illness. And yet in Los Angeles on Saturday, the British-born author whose 32 books on glamour, sex and affairs in Hollywood were international best-sellers, died of breast cancer after being first diagnosed more than six years ago. She had kept the illness secret from all but her closest family and friends.
Even her sister, Joan, had only been informed in the last fortnight. After the news broke on Sunday, Joan posted a picture of herself and Jackie, writing: “Farewell to my beautiful brave baby sister. I will love you and miss you forever. Rest in peace.”
Sitting in a London hotel suite to discuss her latest book, The Santangelos, with the Observer, Jackie had been equally effusive about their bond. “Joan and I are the best of friends,” she said. “We had tea a few days ago and she sent me beautiful flowers when I arrived in London. We’re very close. People are always trying to pitch us against each other … Because we’re both successful. But we’re very different. Joan is incredibly social and flamboyant and she loves to dress up. I’m much more low key and much less likely to go out for lunches and dinners. She loves being out and about, and I love being home, writing.
”
Jackie and Joan in 2009.
If Collins was aware that her time was so limited, you wouldn’t have known it. Power-suited in a black jacket and trouser ensemble (plus trainers, which she explained with an apology about her bad ankle), she was immaculately made up and on great form. If her face looked a little thinner, that could be put down to her work ethic and schedule. And her conversation was as confidential and scandalous as ever. She described a ménage à trois between three female models at a recent Hollywood party and said, with a wink and her trademark dirty laugh “of course that’s going in the next book!”.
Jackie Collins and Oscar Lerman at the party in Belvedere hotel, London 1990. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Shutterstock
Though Collins always gave journalists superb quotes, she nonetheless remained an enigma, giving away little about her private life. But this time she was in a surprisingly reflective and candid mood. And in retrospect, it’s easy to wonder if she was looking back on her life from a new perspective.
She was, she said, working on her autobiography, Reform School or Hollywood. “Yes, I am a private person,” she said. “But I have so much in my memoir I can talk about.” She was ready, she said, to talk for the first time about the death of her beloved second husband, Oscar Lerman, who died from prostate cancer in 1992, and about her fiancé, Frank Calcagnini, who she lost to a brain tumour six years later – and of what it means to care for a sickly loved one. “I want to talk about losing my husband and nursing two men through terminal illness because I think it will help people. And I want to help people. In the past all I’ve said about Oscar and Frank’s deaths is that I wanted to celebrate their lives, not mourn their deaths.
“But I wanted to write about the experience of caring. Caregivers who look after someone have a lot on their plate, and I know there’s people out there who would appreciate hearing how I coped with it. It’s very stressful and you are worried about them all the time and have to make sure they take their meds.
“My fiancé, Frank, was amazing. He was this handsome Italian who looked like a hero from one of my books. I remember taking him to the doctor because he didn’t feel well and had flu and so they took a chest X-ray. I’ll never forget that day. Frank came out of the doctor’s office to where I was sitting in the ante room and just said: ‘I’m fucked, I’ve got three months to live.’ Three months later he was gone. When he lost his black, thick curly hair, he didn’t want to go on. I lost my mum to cancer, too.”
But the memoir, Collins said, would also include plenty of the kind of salacious detail used to such riotous effect in the “bonkbuster” genre with which she is so indelibly associated.
Jackie Collins And Frank Calcagnini in 1994. Photograph: ANL/Rex Shutterstock
“I might get to the end of my memoir and decide I don’t want to publish it but I don’t think I will,” she said. “I think I want it out there.” Smiling mischievously as she spoke, she explained: “I’ll talk about a couple of secret affairs I’ve had – one with a very famous man – which I think will shock people. We were destined to be together but when he was free I was attached and vice versa.” Still, she said, “I’m not going to write anything to wholly embarrass my children … But there’ll be some interesting things in there.”
Those secret affairs may now remain secret. For their part, her daughters expressed nothing but the deepest affection for their mother when they announced her death. In a statement they said: “She lived a wonderfully full life and was adored by her family, friends and the millions of readers who she has been entertaining over four decades. She was a true inspiration, a trail-blazer for women in fiction and a creative force. She will live on through her characters but we already miss her beyond words.”
Perhaps that affection was part of what made Collins able to take a philosophical view of her mortality. “As you get older you get wiser,” she said. “I can do whatever I want – I don’t give a shit about anything any more. As long as I have my family and my friends I’m happy.”
Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.
Bestselling writer known for The World Is Full of Married Men, Hollywood Wives and The Stud, whose books were full of sex, shopping and gutsy women
Veronica Horwell Sun 20 Sep 2015 17.50 BST
When the first of Jackie Collins’s novels, The World Is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968, there was a vast gap between the new expectation that women would freely have, and offer, sex and the actual sexual experience and expertise of most young women. To be good at sex they already had to have been bad – in every sense.
Since women had always been greedy readers of fiction and manuals of behaviour, a market opened for books that united both. Jackie’s work was not the first to combine a strong story with how-it-was-done sex – the success of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) convinced publisher WH Allen to accept Married Men from an unknown author – but it wasoriginal and bold. It was followed by 31 further novels, nearly half a billion copies in total and all on the New York Times bestseller list. For more than 50 years, many interviewers, and most fans, began their conversation by saying Jackie had taught them everything they knew about sex.
Jackie Collins with her sister, Joan, the actor and star of Dynasty. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex
Jackie, who has died aged 77, claimed, without going into detail, that she had been a very bad girl, a wild child. She was the daughter of London theatrical agent Joseph Collins and his dancer wife, Elsa, living on the periphery of glamour. Her older sister, Joan Collins, was an actor and performer from the start. Jackie was an observer – she wanted to have, not simulate, experiences and to write about them. She gathered her first material by hiding when small in the trolley of food that her mother wheeled into the Friday night card parties of her father and his friends, listening to what they said about women when they thought none were present.
Joan wanted to be in the spotlight; Jackie wanted to slip out of her bedroom window and go to West End nightclubs. She was expelled at 15 from Francis Holland school, London, for truancy, smoking and mocking the local flasher. Joan married young, disastrously; Jackie followed older lovers, including Marlon Brando, to Las Vegas and the south of France; she visited Joan in Los Angeles. Jackie tried modelling, acting in British B-pictures and television; she sang a little, way down the variety theatre bill.
In 1960, she married a businessman, Wallace Austin, not knowing he was a drug addict who regularly overdosed; after four years together and the birth of their daughter, Tracy, she divorced him, unwilling to wait for the inevitable night the medics didn’t arrive in time after an overdose. He later took his own life. Her second husband, the American Oscar Lerman, flew to Britain to pursue her. He dealt in art and owned nightclubs – London’s Ad Lib, and, later, Tramp – and granted Jackie the access she had always wanted to watch outrageous nocturnal goings-on with no obligation to join in. After the births of their daughters Tiffany and Rory, Jackie spent the day writing, minding the children outside school hours, then stayed up half the night observing the wildest venues of an unrestrained era from their quietest corners.
Jackie Collins in 1968, holding up a copy of her bestseller The World Is Full of Married Men. Photograph: Bob Dear/AP
Jackie had told Lerman she was a writer and so he read the opening pages of Married Men. “Finish this one,” he said – she had abandoned many novels after a few chapters. “You’re a storyteller.” She wrote 10 pages a day hiding out in a seaside resort and soon found a publisher, provoking huge, and profitably adverse, publicity. It was banned in South Africa and Australia, a politician bought an ad in the Sunday People to protest against it as the most disgusting book he had read, and the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland told Jackie she was “responsible for all the perverts in England”. (“Oh, thank you,” Jackie replied, sincerely.)
Today, when millions of women read and many write far more frank erotica online, the reader is less aware of the sex – not evasive, but not that explicit – than of the confidence and independence of its heroine.
Beyond the mechanics of who put what where, heroines – or rather, female heroes – became Jackie’s métier, especially after 1971 when she began to set her work in the US. The Lermans finally settled in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Jackie’s dream country had always been the US, for ethnic variety, social mobility and glamour, and her favourite popular writers, apart from Dickens and Enid Blyton, were American: Mario Puzo, Harold Robbins, Joseph Wambaugh. She admired Puzo’s The Godfather so much that she turned to crime writing in 1974, with Lovehead, and most successfully with her Santangelo family series, nine novels from Chances (1981) to this year’s The Santangelos. She was promoting the title a few days before she died.
The Santangelos share the mafiosi world of the Corleones and the Sopranos, but their women do more than spend, breed and cook, especially Lucky, who inherits and maintains the family firm. “My heroines kick ass,” Jackie said, complaining of contemporary female masochism in print and film. “They don’t get their asses kicked.”Jackie herself was once held up at Uzi-point in her car in Beverly Hills. She reversed out of trouble, fast. “My heroines do what women would – if they had the courage,” she said.
Jackie knew minor mafiosi and got their details right, just as she had, or had met, or had logged well-sourced gossip on several showbiz generations – “I’m a Bel Air anthropologist.”
She was proud that the valets, maids and chauffeurs of Beverly Hills queued to buy copies of her most successful book, Hollywood Wives (1983), in the hope their employers were in it; although she explained that she synthesised rather than copied from life. The women in her version of Hollywood make more, and usually better, choices than they do in the real Tinseltown. Jackie herself produced some films of her books, notably The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), both starring her sister as disco-owner Fontaine Khaled, which helped pull Joan out of a career slump.
Jackie Collins appearing in an episode of the TV series The Saint in 1963.
Lerman died of cancer in 1992, and Jackie’s next love, the businessman Frank Calcagnini, died of a brain tumour in 1998. She worked through it, always paying attention to pop culture and social media to update her writing and to interact with readers, although a TV chat show, Jackie Collins’ Hollywood, flopped. She had had a hard head for business since she sold her rude limericks to schoolmates. She invested in LA property and produced films and TV series based on her books. And she realised that, since her contracts predated digitalisation, she could self-publish her back list profitably as ebooks, and was surprised to find that half her readers in this medium proved to be male.
In 2013 Jackie was appointed OBE for services to fiction and charity. She confided to the Queen that she had been a school drop-out.
Not even Joan knew until the last about the breast cancer from which her sister died. Jackie is survived by Joan, by their brother, Bill, and by her children, Tracy, Tiffany and Rory.
The New York Public Library compiled a Mad Men Reading List of the books read by characters on the show. It's a great collection of books from the era! Here are a few:
Don Draper's Picks:
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the company of the works of Homer and Virgil, The Inferno is a moving human drama, a journey through the torment of Hell, an expression of the Middle Ages, and a protest against the ways in which men have thwarted the divine plan.
Exodus by Leon Uris
Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon--the towering novel of the twentieth century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies--the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus --one of the great best-selling novels of all time.
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre
In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.
Setting a standard that has never been surpassed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a devastating tale of duplicity and espionage.
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
Roger Sterling's Pick:
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
"We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough. We detest office politicians, toadies, bullies, and pompous asses. We abhor ruthlessness. The way up our ladder is open to everybody. In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else." —David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy was considered the "father of advertising" and a creative genius by many of the biggest global brands. First published in 1963, this seminal book revolutionized the world of advertising and became a bible for the 1960s ad generation. It also became an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages. Fizzing with Ogilvy's pioneering ideas and inspirational philosophy, it covers not only advertising, but also people management, corporate ethics, and office politics, and forms an essential blueprint for good practice in business.
Joan Harris's Pick:
Lady Chatterly's Lover by DH Lawrence
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage and her growing love for the robust gamekeeper of her husband's estate. The most controversial of Lawrence's books, Lady Chatterly's Lover joyously affirms the author's vision of individual regeneration through sexual love. The book's power, complexity, and psychological intricacy make this a completely original work—a triumph of passion, an erotic celebration of life.
Clémentine’s life is turned upside down the day she meets Emma, a young girl with blue hair who leads her to discover the many facets of desire.
Emma is to allow her finally to stop worrying about what other people think.
This sweet and sensitive tale arrived quietly by post at our offices of Glénat Benelux, like so many other packages full of their author’s hopes. Sadly the majority of them are lacking in originality and full of clumsy turns of phrase. This is the lot of writing and publishing. It’s all about selection.
When I read the draft by this young French author living in Brussels, I was immediately struck by the rhythm of the narrative and above all by its ring of personal experience, its candor and lack of militancy.
Every draft is discussed around the table to gauge opinions, and everyone reacts differently according to their sensibilities. In this case the enthusiasm was widespread and infectious.
That is how this book over 150 pages came to enrich the Glénat catalogue. While it was being written we were able to accompany Julie through her artistic \"labour pains\".
So here it is, the finished book, having reached the final stage.
It is my sincere belief that everyone, whatever their attitude to feminine homosexuality, will feel passionate about this book. For it is a book about passions, about love and tenderness, beyond prejudice.
Jacqueline Bisset: A Movie Icon from the 60s Bisset is a popular actress who first appeared on screen in the 60s She has managed to keep her career strong for over 40 years Bisset is not slowing down with roles rumored
